Just when hope withers, the visa is granted. The door opens to a street like in the movies, clean of people, of cats; except it is your street you are leaving. A visa has been granted, ‘provisionally’ – a fretful word. The windows you have closed behind you are turning pink, doing what they do every dawn. Here it’s gray. The door to the taxicab waits. This suitcase, the saddest object in the world. Well, the world’s open. And now through the windshield the sky begins to blush as you did when your mother told you what it took to be a woman in this life.

I was ill, lying on my bed of old papers,when you came with white rabbits in your arms; and the doves scattered upwards, flying to mothers, and the snails sighed under their baggage of stone …

Now your tongue grows like celery between us: Because of our love-cries, cabbage darkens in its nest; the cauliflower thinks of her pale, plump children and turns greenish-white in a light like the ocean’s.

I was sick, fainting in the smell of teabags, when you came with tomatoes, a good poetry. I am being wooed. I am being conqueredby a cliff of limestone that leaves chalk on my breasts.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Essentials 5 5 Essentials Running Running Essentials Short Short Inch Inch Running Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.

whatever slid into my mother’s room that late june night, tapping her great belly,Essentials Inch Essentials Running 5 Essentials Running Running Short Inch 5 Short summoned me out roundheaded and unsmiling. is this the moon, my father used to grin.cradling me? it was the moon but nobody knew it then.

the moon understands dark places.the moon has secrets of her own.she holds what light she can.

we girls were ten years old and giggling in our hand-me-downs. we wanted breasts,pretended that we had them, tissuedour undershirts. jay johnson is teaching me to french kiss, ella bragged, whois teaching you? how do you say; my father?

the moon is queen of everything.she rules the oceans, rivers, rain.when I am asked whose tears these areI always blame the moon.

no one leaves home unlesshome is the mouth of a sharkyou only run for the borderwhen you see the whole city running as well62

your neighbors running faster than youbreath bloody in their throatsthe boy you went to school withwho kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factoryis holding a gun bigger than his bodyyou only leave homewhen home won’t let you stay.32

no one leaves home unless home chases youfire under feethot blood in your bellyit’s not something you ever thought of doinguntil the blade burnt threats intoyour neckand even then you carried the anthem underyour breathonly tearing up your passport in an airport toiletssobbing as each mouthful of papermade it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,that no one puts their children in a boatunless the water is safer than the land112no one burns their palmsunder trainsbeneath carriagesno one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truckfeeding on newspaper unless the miles travelledmeans something more than journey.no one crawls under fencesno one wants to be beatenpitied

no one chooses refugee campsor strip searches where yourbody is left achingor prison,because prison is saferthan a city of fireand one prison guardin the nightis better than a truckloadof men who look like your fatherno one could take itInch Inch 5 5 Running Running Short Short Essentials Running Essentials Essentials no one could stomach itno one skin would be tough enough

thego home blacksrefugeesdirty immigrantsasylum seekerssucking our country dryniggers with their hands outthey smell strangesavagemessed up their country and now they wantto mess ours uphow do the wordsthe dirty looksroll off your backsmaybe because the blow is softerthan a limb torn off

or the words are more tenderthan fourteen men betweenyour legsor the insults are easierto swallowthan rubblethan bonethan your child bodyin pieces.i want to go home,but home is the mouth of a sharkhome is the barrel of the gunand no one would leave home10unless home chased you to the shoreunless home told youto quicken your legsleave your clothes behindcrawl through the desertwade through the oceansdrownsavebe hungerbegforget prideyour survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your earsaying-leave,run away from me nowi dont know what i’ve becomebut i know that anywhereis safer than here

Sure, I want to believe a poem can block a bullet toothat a poem could save me at the end of the world,my bug-out bag teeming with “Good Bones.” My friend’shusband sells guns. He’s a republican. His sales boomunder a democratic president, and sometimes he feelsstrange-weird about making money off his opposition.But people are afraid, he says, that their guns will get takenaway, so they load up and up, and now that Trump is herepeople are pushing poems around the Internet like a salve,slathering feeds with verse as sustenance for the apocalypse.I’m getting emails about my work, they read: it’s so importantright now. I think right now has always been for sale. I wasalways born writing poems about my skin and country. Anyonein marketing knows about fads. Sometimes when I enter a newhouse I wonder if they have a gun hiding under their bed, lockedand cocked… when I just have a poem in my pocket or stuckin my head. Like when I’m in traffic, sometimes I say out loud:I know all words come from preexisting words and divideuntil our pronouncements develop selves. Sometimes I’ll mess upand say it again until the line rolls over my tongue like warm milk.LA Sweater winter Daydreamer Boutique Pullover Zp8RwcqCIf someone breaks into my house and wants to kill me, do it.I’ll have nothing but a stack of books by my bed that I’ve beenwanting to read or am in the middle of reading or holding a giftEssentials Running 5 Inch 5 Essentials Running Inch Essentials Running Short Short from a friend who said you need this book right now. I thought of youwhen I read this book. See: when you [ ], everythingbe a poem. Everything be – my life still standing – a loaded Gun.Every. Thing. Be, a deadly foe bent on my destruction. No, I can’tseparate my politics from my family or my body from my body.You say you love me/You say you love me/You say you love me,then love these parts of me you didn’t vote for, and then say howEssentials Essentials 5 Essentials Running Inch Short Running Inch 5 Short Running much you love me again. Say it louder. Say it till you’re tired likeI’m tired of forgiving and explaining myself. Sometimes, I don’twant to forgive, or explain myself. Yes, I write what I know andwhat I want you to know (and what I don’t know): is everything,how everything be so in right now, yes, everything might be fallingapart, but the center must hold, because when you [ ]:it has to. The center can hold—the center can hold and still sing.

just overnight. America goes to sleep and they’re thereand they wake up and they’re not

the scary part? ______stick with methey’re not gone. YOU JUST CAN’T SEE EM_____think about it_____they can see each other_____but you can’t see them_____and they could be anywhere

the girl you passed up for the promotionshe could be in your carready to yank your head back by your hairright when you’re at a busy intersection

the woman you grabbed on the subway escalatorshe could be in your living roomlooking through your tax returns

the group of friends you whistled atmight take turns whistling back at you from hidden placesshrill, and off-key, until you go mad

the one you prodded and whispered aboutInch Inch Running 5 Short Essentials 5 Running Running Essentials Essentials Short she might be lurking in the men’s roomInch Essentials Short Short Running Running Inch Essentials Essentials Running 5 5 with a sharp letter opener and a roll of duct tape

the girl you lied on again and againmight be on the back porch where you smokeand she’s dousing your cigarettes in lighter fluid

they could be anywhere with knivesor guns or poison or machetes orthings they have to say to you about youand you have to listen

i mean let’s be real maybe they would just leavego somewhere warm and secret, string up Christmas lights,raise goats and chickens, grow zucchini and fire up the grill,make every night for cards and barbecue, let their hair growor cut it all off, let themselves get fator skinny, talk about thingsthat are not you

but then againmaybe they would do everything you did to themdo it moreand fasterand harderwith all the mean they learned from you.the witless crueltythe smirking dismissalsthe rope across your wristall the twisted words and lucky punches

and you wouldn’t even see them coming

***

horror movie pitch 2

this one is even better than the last. you’ll love it.it’s like_____ your typical Exorcist-type situationyou knownot religious, but Old Testament inspired.like, rivers of blood.

it goes like this

the men who climbed to acclaim on our backsdigging their knees into our kidneysdirty nails into our thighs

all of their books, films, albums,whatever they made in this lifecatches on fire.but before it burns it bleeds.stigmata, on paperstaining the nice office carpeting of important peopleand then turning their hands to boilswhen they reach out to touch the thing they once loved.

the men don’t burn, just their work.and they watch it all happen from comfortable chairs they didn’t pay forbefore the locusts come

Fortunately, the family, anxious about its diminishingfood supply, encountered a small, possibly hostile pigalong the way. The daughter happened upon it firstpushing its scuffed snout against something hiddenat the base of a thornbush: a blood-covered egg, maybe,or small rubber ball exactly like the sort that snappedfrom the paddle my mother used to beat me withwhen I let her down. At the time the father and motherwere tangled in some immemorial dispute about causeand effect: who’d harmed whom first, how jealousydid not, in fact, begin as jealousy but as desperation.When the daughter called out to them, they turnedto see her lift the pig, it was no heavier than an orphan,from the bushes and then set it down in their path.They waited to see whether the pig might idle forwardwith them until they made camp or wander back towardthe home they’d abandoned to war. Night, enclosedin small drops of rain, began to fall upon them.“Consequence” is the word that splintered my mind.Walking a path in the dark is about somethingHENLEY BLACK SLEEVE SHIRT SHIRT BLACK LONG HENLEY SLEEVE BLACK LONG HENLEY SHIRT LONG SLEEVE SLEEVE LONG HENLEY BRfwqAnH4the way a family is about something. Like the pig,I too, wanted to reach through the thorns for the eggor ball, believing it was a symbol of things to come.I wanted to roll it in my palm like the headof a small redbird until it sang to me. I wantedto know how my mother passed her days havingnever touched her husband’s asshole, for example.Which parts of your body have never been touched,I wanted to ask. I’d been hired to lead the familyfrom danger to a territory full of more seeds than bullets,but, truth was, in the darkness there was no tellingwhat was rooting in the soil. Plots of complete silence,romantics posing in a field bludgeoned by shame.The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumpsits passion and fear down the veins. Which is to say,starting out we have no wounds to speak ofbeyond the ways our parents expressed their love.We were never sure what the pig was after or whetherit was, in fact, not a pig but some single-minded souldespair turned into a pig, some devil worthy of mercy.Without giving away the enigmatic ending, I will say,when we swallowed the flesh, our eyes were closed.

the one we make togetherawkward5 Running Short Essentials Essentials Inch Inch Running Running Short Essentials 5 inconsistentas a lame cat on the looseor quick as kids freed by the bellor else as strictlyonceas only life must meana once upon a time

I have rejected propaganda teaching meabout the beautifulthe truly rare

(supposedlythe soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shoresupposedlythe soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shoreis beautifulfor instance)butthe truly rare can stay out there

I have rejected thatabstraction that enormityunless I see a dog walk on the beach/a bird seize sandfliesor yourselfapproach melaughing out a sound to spoilthe pretty pictureEssentials Inch 5 Short Running 5 Essentials Short Essentials Running Running Inch make an uncontrolledheartbeating memoryinstead

I read the papers preaching onthat oil and oxygenthat redwoods and the evergreensthat trees the waters and the atmospherecompile a final listing of the world inshort supply

but all alive and all the livespersist perpetualin jeopardypersistas scarce as every one of usas difficult to findor keepas irreplaceable5 5 Running Essentials Inch Short Essentials Inch Essentials Running Running Short as frailas every one of us

I have always believed that love isan overflowing, an abundance one needsto be rid of, to pour into another. That other can be a man or a woman, dog or hillockor headdress of ostrich feathers; it can besculpture or shoreline or even a sunless dayseeping its silvery light over the Thames.It may arrive quietly, a moment between momentsin the river of talk, after the hot soup but beforethe mutton; or it can be the mutton, too - its ginger tang and musky finish.However it comes, the sensation is massive, inconvenient, undeniable.

If one were to banish extravagance,all longing would take on edges. Witnessthe general, poised on the smoking field,as he surveys the strewn body bitswith a ghoulish mix of rue and relish,he has won another snippet of territoryand is hungry for more. Love is rounderand less dignified; if love brandished a swordI would kneel and bare my neck.

Some call me gaudy, capricious; it’s truethat I drool when I drink and cannot walk the pathfrom bed to breakfast tray without wheezing.I’m gouty, corseted, flatulent, - but it’s all because I cannot refuse a thing it’s chanceto shine, to sigh or deliquesce. So let there bestars in every glass and fireworks over the park,spun sugar pagodas on mirrored lakes, diamonds,a footman in ancient armor, crimson drapery;and down the center of the banquet tableset for two hundred in the Gothic conservatoryan actual stream - pure water cascadingbetween banks of real moss with tiny flowers - and fish flashing, gold and silver, down the sluice.

More pineapple, more cherry wine!Tell the other two thousand guestsgathered in Carlton Housethat we are here to show the worldEngland’s swaggering heart;and that I intend to celebrate all century,until something even grander arrives - more outrageous and beautiful - to swallow mein its monstrous, invisible embrace.